No. You're conflating two things, which is easy to do since they pretty well blur together, and I wasn't clear in writing it. One is the BLM itself, its leaders, its organization, its agenda. The other - which I'm talking about - is the statement or slogan "Black Lives Matter." It has nothing to do with any specific instance, such as the Michael Brown incident which has been shown to a fraudulent narrative. It was by many people simply a statement that we can't tolerate black people being shot by the police unnecessarily. You can debate the underlying facts of that, and certainly you can show that the numbers don't match with what's being touted, but the second you do that, you have now (in their mind) excused or minimized the person who (according to their understanding) has been shot without cause. And we all know it's happened - which begs the question why the left keeps jumping on the instances that turn out to be made up or exaggerated. And that's the reason why the phrase is used - because their perception is that by discounting it as "just business as usual," you're saying that it isn't a big deal. So they respond that "Black Lives Matter" - because in their mind, they don't matter to some people.
So of course, the response is "it's not just black people, other people get shot too. Black lives aren't uniquely special - ALL lives matter." And I would like to think that the VAST majority of people agree with both of these statements. No one in America with any sanity wants innocent people of any color or race or gender or religion gunned down in this country. And yet we got into huge arguments about it.
The reason: Because if you're going to a funeral for someone who was a great athlete, and you get up to do the eulogy and say "Yes he was great, but there are a lot of people who are great athletes. We should take this time to celebrate ALL of them, not just this one person," we would all get why that's inappropriate. It minimizes the point of the occasion, which is to celebrate a specific person and to grieve with specific people about a specific loss they feel.
So when someone says "Black Lives Matter" and you respond "No, ALL lives matter," they see that as you minimizing their loss, their suffering, their pain, because you're basically saying "there's no issue here, you need to get over it." Whether that's true or not, it's not productive and it's sure not going to help the debate.
So now we have a situation where the Democrats have done EXACTLY what they demonized many conservatives for doing. They clearly did it for the purposes of minimizing their own racism within their ranks. And as conservatives, I hope we can see that parallel, and maybe understand more why saying "All Lives Matter" as a response is taken as being dismissive of racism and police brutality that does exist - even if not in the volume that some claim. And maybe we need to ask ourselves a pretty hard question too: is our response an attempt to minimize or ignore the idea that there actually are instances of racism in law enforcement? You don't have to accept the Michael Brown narrative to acknowledge that those things do happen and they're not acceptable.
